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Funding for the artist does not equal control over the art produced. Unless the US has turned into an 18th century duchy without me noticing.

In the US this is actually a major issue and (sorry) funding does equal control. Read the Wiki entry on the NEA, especially the 1989 controversy over NEA grants to Mapplethorpe etc (mentioned earlier) and the vetoes of grants to specific artists in 1990 and following. 'The "NEA Four", Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes, were performance artists whose proposed grants from the United States government's National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were vetoed by John Frohnmayer in June 1990. Grants were overtly vetoed on the basis of subject matter after the artists had successfully passed through a peer review process.'

TIme and again the free market is the best way to get things done. It's too bad the public at large doesn't value the arts anymore. But that's the fault of the artists, our crappy educational system, the mass media...

In the US this is actually a major issue and (sorry) funding does equal control. Read the Wiki entry on the NEA, especially the 1989 controversy over NEA grants to Mapplethorpe etc (mentioned earlier) and the vetoes of grants to specific artists in 1990 and following. 'The "NEA Four", Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes, were performance artists whose proposed grants from the United States government's National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were vetoed by John Frohnmayer in June 1990. Grants were overtly vetoed on the basis of subject matter after the artists had successfully passed through a peer review process.'

So in USA if a benefactor chooses to donate to an orchestra does he get to veto what is played?

I’m sure that happens, especially if the orchestra depends heavily on a large contributor. And legally it can happen.

I believe most orchestras, though, program according to their business objectives which may be many. One key objective, of course, is always to stay afloat financially, which means putting bums in seats consistently and at a decent price. That introduces its own bias into programming, of course.

Added: Most US orchestras depend on private contributions for well over half their costs. They are particularly solicitous of their annual season subscribers and will do just about anything to avoid offending them. Since a good portion of these folks are business people or their surviving spouses, it’s likely their musical tastes may be “less refined” than those often found in this forum. Sad but true!

I read that little article you sent to me a couple of posts ago, KenOC, and had my suspicions confirmed: it'd be Christian conservatives having a tantrum and implementing that tantrum in policy. We don't have Christian fundamentalists having a say in our Arts funding, unlike the US, nor other kinds of partisan dogmatists of any other ideology trying to censor everything. Sure, we have our annoying politically correct folk like the rest of the western world, but they're dealt with fairly swiftly: take the recent affair in Manchester Art Gallery, when a curator removed a Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece from display because she thought its depiction of the female nude was 'problematic', or some other cliched cultural studies argument. There was a public outlash and so the painting was put up again within a few days. And that was just a curator. Our galleries are public anyway, but as a result, the public has a right to be outraged when censorship occurs from up on high and it is resolved.
Maybe art funding = control over in America, but only because it's a raging cultural battlefield just like almost every other corner of American life as I see it from across the pond. Please convince me I'm wrong.